Putin's Kgb Work Spurs News Reports

January 10, 2000|By New York Times News Service.

MOSCOW — A spate of reports in the German press over the weekend suggested that acting President Vladmir Putin was decorated for his work as a KGB agent in East Germany during the 1980s and was even expelled from West Germany at one point after being identified as a Soviet spy.

But beyond vague statements from German intelligence spokesmen, there was little to confirm the accounts. American intelligence officials, speaking privately, have said that to their knowledge, Putin's 15-year career as a KGB agent was not exceptional.

Putin, who became Russia's acting president when President Boris Yeltsin resigned Dec. 31, entered the KGB's foreign intelligence arm after graduating from Leningrad State University in 1975.

He is said to have left the service in 1990 after spending most of his career in Dresden, then an East German city frequented by Western businessmen.

Precisely what he did there was of little interest until Putin's sudden ascension to prime minister last August, and then to the Russian presidency last month. Since then, reports in the Western press have covered the spectrum of possibilities, from the chance that he was a drudge who filed reports about East German political leanings to the prospect that he ran a vast economic espionage campaign against the West in the Soviet Union's dying days.

The most spectacular of the weekend's German reports, in the newspaper Saechsische Zeitung, the main daily of the Saxony region where Putin was active as a KGB agent, quoted German intelligence sources as saying Putin was expelled from West Germany near the end of the 1970s on suspicion of espionage in Bonn.

The report states that Putin worked under the cover of a correspondent for TASS, then the official Soviet news agency. It quoted Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB official who has made a name as a critic of the agency, as saying that Putin's work there was not particularly successful.

On the other hand, other reports over the weekend said that Putin was a frequent visitor to West Germany in the 1980s, sometimes moving through Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War gateway between East and West Berlin, and sometimes using the name of Lt. Col. Adamov or Mr. Adamov.

The newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported that allied intelligence agents photographed Putin in the mid-1980s outside the posh West Berlin department store KaDeWe, perhaps -- they suspected -- waiting for a rendezvous with a Soviet agent.

Several journals reported that Putin received an award from East Germany late in his career for his work there but differed over the nature of the recognition. Most agreed that it was of little importance.